This entertainment nirvana has come to you through a superfast, all-you-can-eat Internet connection. But soon that will change.

Starting May 2, AT&T will impose limits on how much information its customers can download and upload. If you've got a traditional DSL connection, you'll be limited to 150 gigabytes of data monthly. If you've got the company's more sophisticated — and often faster - U-verse Internet service, you'll have a limit of 250 GB a month.

Turning to Comcast won't bring you any relief, either. The cable company already has a cap of its own - 250 GB per month, adopted in October 2009.

AT&T and Comcast insist that their caps are aimed at curtailing overuse of their networks and that the vast majority of their users never come close to the edge. Indeed, you may be surprised to learn how little data you actually use.

For example, I thought I was a pretty heavy user of data. I live my life online. My wife and I both have iPhones, and when we're home, they're connected to our Wi-Fi network and Comcast's Internet service. We watch streaming movies or TV shows from Netflix and Amazon.com at least two or three times a week. And when I recently bought an Internet-connected HDTV, I thought for sure I'd be gobbling up more data against the 250 GB cap.

But no. Although my household's monthly usage is up a bit, it's still way under the cap. According to the bandwidth meter available in the account area on Comcast's Web site, in March we used 43 GB of data, compared with 32 GB in February and 26 GB in January. We have a long way to go before we hit our limit, but the trend is clear. We - and others like us - are using more each month.

Let's say you've got two teenage kids, each with a computer and access to the family's Netflix account. While you're watching movies in the den on your Internet-connected HDTV, the offspring are each doing the same thing in their respective rooms. A two-hour high-definition movie from Netflix takes about 3.6 GB in data. In an evening, this happy digital family could pull down almost 11 GB. If this happened 15 times in a month, that's more than 160 GB - not over U-verse's or Comcast's cap, but well past the limit for AT&T's standard DSL service.

'The Cloud'

And we'll have more opportunities to bust the gates, as more services move into what techie types call "The Cloud" - a collection of online services and storage. For example, last month Amazon.com launched an online music service called the Cloud Player. You upload your digital music collection into Amazon's digital "locker," and you can then play your music from any PC, Mac or Android smartphone.

Of course, Amazon also sells digital music, and when you buy one of its MP3 albums, you're invited to add it to your locker. When you want to play it, it streams over your Internet connection to a player in a Web browser.

Digital music files are relatively small, but entire libraries are not. Because I bought an Amazon MP3 album, I was given access to 20 GB of storage free for a year. My digital music collection is almost that big, and if I were to upload it to Amazon, that act alone would add almost 20 GB to my allotment for the month.

And Amazon is just one player. In the next few months, Apple - the 900-pound gorilla of digital music - is expected to launch its own streaming music service through its ubiquitous iTunes software. Search giant Google is also planning a streaming music service.

Even the companies that sell you capped Internet access have streaming content for you. Cable TV companies, seeing the writing on the wall, are starting to make their programming available online. For example, Comcast released a new iPad app under its Xfinity brand that offers subscribers the ability to receive more than 4,500 hours of streaming video. If your iPad is connected to your Comcast Internet connection at home, it still counts against your data limit. AT&T has a similar app for its U-verse subscribers.

New name for column

So while your Internet provider's data limits may seem generous now, they likely won't be in just a few years. Executives for both AT&T and Comcast have said their caps may be revised depending on how their networks are used, but that could mean customers would face tiered pricing, similar to what's happened with data plans for smartphones. The more data you use, the more you'll pay. Either way, as the landscape changes, the price of admission is likely to go up.

This move to universal access to data and services online is a profound enough change that I believe it's time for a few changes of my own. Starting today, my weekly column is being renamed from Computing to Always On. The original name dates to the column's start in 1993, when computers were decidedly less friendly. The new name reflects that our lives are being changed by having instant access to information, entertainment and, perhaps most importantly, each other. Going forward, the content of this column will reflect that as well because, in the very near future, all of us will be always on.